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I love listening to music topically. Some days I’ll search my whole library for a single word and listen that way. It’s like a strange conversation–hearing different artists from different genres all chiming in about the same thing.

So I made a mix about family. In this mix, you’ll hear Kanye update his relatives in prison, the Avetts leave some last wishes, James Blake lament being an only child, and Rufus tackle daddy issues via cover song. We’ve also got a handful of variations on the ‘advice song’ trope: Drive-By Truckers’ iconic father-son lesson ‘Outfit’, Vienna Teng’s retelling of her grandmother’s less-than-welcome advice about men and careers, and The Coup’s outrageous ‘Wear Clean Draws’, in which Boots Riley’s passes on his anti-establishment politics to his daughter in a totally unique lesson on what it means to be a woman.

I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to suggest other family songs in the comments section!

A couple other highlights:

-my friend Reid Comstock has been making a splash lately with his psych-pop band Tiger Waves, and I included my favorite song from his 2008 folk project, Father Padraig & the Next of Kin. He wrote ‘Emily’s Funeral Song’ after losing his mother to cancer, and his performance of that song at a house concert a few years ago was powerful and I won’t forget it.

-for more on Mary Gauthier’s mother, check out this previous post on The Foundling.

-everyone knows and loves ‘My Girls’, but does everyone realize how unbelievably awesome it is? It’s entirely about a father’s concerns about providing for his family.

-‘Song for Mama’ isn’t an Abigail Washburn tune at all – its backstory remarkable enough that I’ll just link to it here and here.

Note: I included two songs–Joanna Newsom’s ‘Emily’ and Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Djohariah’–that are ass-long, so feel free to skip those. The mix works either way. But they’re two incredible songs, each an epic ode to the artist’s sister.

Mary Gauthier’s most recent album is a really beautiful, though flawed, exploration of adoption and emotional woundedness–sort of a new take on the old folk music trope of the orphan girl.

For her most recent album, The Foundling, Gauthier has front-loaded the backstory. Press materials describe The Foundling as a concept album about “the emotional journey and aftermath” of Gauthier’s search for the birth mother who abandoned her at an orphanage in New Orleans following her birth in 1962. Though Gauthier has always done autobiography well, a confessional concept album is a big jump for any artist. Especially given such personal subject matter, a project like this could easily slip into rhetorical solipsism. Luckily, Gauthier fares pretty well here, in large part because of her careful way with words.